North America

Will Blythe join Bambi and Godzilla at Mercuria to create a new commodities trading dream team? The fate of Blythe Masters, head of commodities at JPMorgan, is in the spotlight now that the sale of the bank’s physical commodities business to Mercuria for $3.5 billion has been confirmed.

This week’s comments from US Fed chair Janet Yellen bring the prospect of earlier-than-expected US rate hikes, and with it a potentially broader relief for FX markets characterized by a sideways-moving USD, falling volatilities and marginal carry plays.

Corporate finance activity is expected to keep on rising this year, particularly in mergers and acquisitions, but companies that engage in deal-making need to be vigilant of the threat of cyber crime around acquisitions.

There are some benefits to having an incredibly untidy desk. While conscious that we had not tidied up for a while, even Euromoney was taken aback by what we found under a pile of papers in the office: Lehman Brothers’ Outlook for the ABS market, published in February 2007. Given what happened just months later, the document makes for rather eerie reading.

When the US Federal Reserve held a consultation last year about implementing a real-time payments system, the plan received a cool reception from banks.

A group of the world’s biggest banks have agreed to join forces with Swift to develop and use a centralized due-diligence system designed to reduce the burden of compliance and the rising regulatory costs associated with it.

Euromoney recalls meetings with John Lefevre, in his former capacity as an Asian bond executive, who has been outed as the man behind the wildly popular @GSElevator Twitter account, which purports to tweet conversations between Goldman Sachs employees around the world.

Vikram Pandit, the former Citigroup CEO, who was ousted in 2012, is casting his net wide as he looks for ways to stay busy.

Global macro trends will normalize, boosting volatility and FX returns, argue analysts, despite the unflattering returns of FX hedge funds, the fall in AUM of currency-specific funds last year – even as the industry received bumper inflows – and recent high-profile failures.

The addition of JPMorgan and Citi to start-up trading platform ParFX marks the acceleration of the platform’s growth as it plans to open to the buy side in the summer.

Banks remain as committed as ever to their corporate-card franchises, despite the emergence of new payment channels, including mobile-payment technologies that some argue could ultimately make cards redundant.

Global transaction services banks have put the crisis behind them and are gearing up for a new phase of technological development and innovation, which could revolutionize the processes involved in trade finance.

You'll find a new private banking channel on euromoney.com, comprising analysis of trends shaping the industry, interviews with heads of private banking at the largest global wealth management institutions, interviews with the top five CIOs at the private banks, and much more.

Old Lane is, to many outsiders, the biggest blot on Pandit’s career at Citi. After being forced out of Morgan Stanley in 2005 by its then chief executive, Philip Purcell, Pandit and a group of close colleagues, who included now-Citi senior executives such as John Havens and Brian Leach, joined the legion of former bankers who set up hedge funds. Old Lane began operations in March 2006.

After decades of steady growth for six big banks, the Canadian banking sector is fast consolidating. The old certainties have been undermined by the announcements of mergers between Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal in January and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Toronto Dominion Bank in April. The rush to merge follows a global trend fuelled by the need to cope with increased competition, and was stimulated by the BankAmerica/NationsBank merger in the US. But unlike their US counterparts, RBC/BMO and CIBC/TD have to run the gauntlet of rigorous banking regulation, entrenched political conventions and hostile popular opinion.

Citicorp suffered the latest in a series of disasters when president Richard Braddock left in unusual circumstances on the eve of a crucial capital­raising exercise. Its tendency to stumble into trouble has obscured chairman John Reed's success in reviving a bank that teetered on the brink of extinction. But ahead lies the big task of changing Citi's anarchic, competitive culture, with its hunger for revenue rather than profit.

"The grand old man of Wall Street" is a title John Weinberg, chairman of Goldman Sachs, wears uneasily.

The best that can be said for Citibank is that it wasn't solely to blame for the most embarrassing deal in years; Chase, Salomon and Lazard should all bow their heads for their parts in the LBO financing that so nearly sent the world's markets into the abyss. Only the Japanese were blameless – even though everyone tried to put the blame on them. Here, Peter Lee reveals how the incredible earnings projections for UAL were developed and names the executives who put the transaction together. And one moral emerges from the story: if you're a mean, hard-nosed CFO, sooner or later the banks will exact their revenge.

The market for asset-backed securities could make the corporate bond market look like a minnow – there are trillions at stake. Peter Lee assesses the bond-boggling numbers.

Everyone within hailing distance of Wall and Broad streets on the afternoon of October 19 may have experienced the same feeling: that our lives had taken one of those profound turns that would affect us in ways we couldn’t yet know.

Drexel was first into junk bonds; now there’s a gold rush – how much is worth competing for?

When Euromoney first pointed out the dangers of the leveraged buyout (April 1984) the fashion was new and exciting – too exciting, declared Paul Volcker, who subdued the general enthusiasm for a time, but the fashion came back, with complications explained in full for the first time here.

Banking has probably changed more over the last year than it did over the previous 20, so how should a major international bank position itself in a decade in which change will probably accelerate? Here’s a case study of one strategy – that of one of the most international of all banks, the Chase Manhattan.

A meeting was held to discuss was the major financial question to be raised so far by the Iranian crisis: why had the $500 million syndicated loan for the government of Iran been declared in default so quickly?

A 10th anniversary essay by David Rockefeller, chairman, The Chase Manhattan Bank NA.

David Rockefeller is a man under pressure. At 63, he has three years before retirement rules force him to step down from the chairmanship of Chase Manhattan Bank. That is not a lot of time for the tasks that confront him.